youre makin a lot of unrelated excuses for a guy who missed weight by 5 pounds... its not performing miracles, its part of the job. if you come in 5 lbs heavy (especially at a lower weight class, where thats a proportionally bigger chunk of your weight) that says to me you didnt even TRY to make the weight.

I was just expecting a lot more people to miss weight because camps are disrupted, Stephens's camp in particular is already in shambles because his coach got fucking murdered, and if you have enough fights you're probably going to eventually miss weight.

The fact that Stephens is pretty consistent at making weight over a long career and only missed during an incredibly odd series of events lets me cut him a lot more slack than I would normally do.

It's different with say, Ray Borg where he missed weight four times, once at a higher weight class. Or with someone like Hendricks where once the IV ban went into affect and his team fell apart so did his weight cutting regime. You have to look at this in terms of context.

Emmett is the hardest hitting FW fighter I've ever seen. His only decision victory he got 4 knockdowns in the first round, one-punch flatlined MJ and Lamas, dropped Bektic with a jab. Even in his loss to Stephens he dropped Jeremy in the first.

I would say the coaching, he finally has a proper team where he doesnt coach himself and focus on his skillsets, current coach is also Eddie Cha and Captain Eric, both amazing and what they did to Borra and Cejudo.

That might sound like a nice story, but his military service was more like a mandatory time-out from professional fighting. He was allowed to operate his MMA gym and train, just not compete. He went through basic training of course, but you can think of the rest of his service as a glorified desk job.

And this is in no way a knock on Zombie. The government recognized and valued his potential as a professional athlete and granted him this arrangement because legally they couldn't exempt him outright.

That's definitely part of it but also part of the way they "excused" his unique enlistment. The Korean government isn't stupid, they know a guy like Zombie can do a lot more for the country by succeeding as a pro athlete than serving in the army for 2 years, they tried their best to accomodate him. The time off took away his chance to fight but it also gave him time to heal his injuries.

eh... The Korean army does train for military shit but a chunk of it is just being a cheap labour force that only pays like $7/hour

there's a lot of shovelling for some reason - just what my male counterparts have told me

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it's def the training and the coaching

Agreed, but to be fair he probably improved his skills during the army training time! Other than boot camp you get to still be with your family and have free time, so training during that 2 years helped refine his brutal power in to a great technical fighter!

I think he had his shoulder injury during that time, so probably skipped too physical things for a while... Also I heard he did fencing training as well. Probably partly explains his improved distance measuring!

It's just a meme. Ngannou has become one of the top HWs, dominating all these lifelong kickboxers/wrestlers with only a few years of training. Prior to fighting he was a sand miner in Cameroon, hence sand mining is the best base for MMA.

Can we fuck off with this? You shouldn't get an extra life just because you had a certain number of title defences

If Max is still the best guy to fight for the title he'll be able to beat a top contender to earn a shot again. It doesn't have to be 12 dudes, if Max beats ONE top contender that's enough for the title shot again. But that one will still set him up better (confidence and time to improve), makes it more exciting for the fans (new fights for the title and makes Max seem an exciting challenger again instead of the dude who JUST got totally outclassed) and keeps the division moving

If Max is still the best guy to fight for the title he'll be able to beat a top contender to earn a shot again

True, but why make him do the TJ Dillashaw route? The BS shit where after cruz won he fought the ghost of Urijah faber and then #8 at the time Garbrandt. TJ fought #1 contender Assuncao and #3 contender Lineker (he was #2), and dominated both.

Imagine max having to fight KZ and Zabit just to get a crack at Volk!?

I was a big fan of Bermudez. I remember when he was on that seven fight win streak and he was looking like the dark horse in the division. Unfortunately, it all fell apart after the Lamas loss.

The worst thing about his career was watching his retirement speech get cut short due to time. I know it wasn't Anik's fault but it always rubbed me the wrong way that a veteran of seventeen fights in the UFC couldn't get a little longer to say his goodbyes.

Yeah it was really rough especially when the speech involved his family member with cancer. I definitely need to go back and watch that. He was a fun fighter inside and outside of the octagon, that is for sure.

This was during a time when Bermudez was also trying to reinvent his social media presence. He was doing podcasts, cooking shows, lifestyle vlog type stuff, and was picking up traction on reddit, people were legitimately starting to warm to him, and then it all seemed to disappear right after this fight.

TKZ has been my favourite featherweight since the first Garcia fight. I was so scared that he'd come back and the game would have passed him and his style by. He's just better than ever. I miss that old TKZ recklessness and chaos but he's become an absolute beast. So sharp and some how so much more powerful.

I remember the sherdog forums. Never used it though. I would've loved to make comments on dream mashups during those times. The whole UFC / chuck Liddell vs pride / wandelei silva was great for the sport. Fedor and CRO cop was huge at the time. Same with Fedor and Noguiera.

Zabit's wins are garbage compared to KZ. Zabit's only high level wins are against Stephens and Kattar in 3 rounders where he was fading fast.

Zombie is absolutely on another level from those guys, he's got his last 3 wins via TKO in a little over 7 minutes. The last time Zabit had a fight end in less than 7 minutes was 2016 and that wasn't in the UFC. 13:46 is his shortest fight in the UFC.